A Charleston thriller: The Jon Sealy Interview

By Steve Weddle

I've been a fan of Jon Sealy's since The Whiskey Baron came out a little more than 10 years ago. Of that book, the Richmond Time-Dispatch said: "What you’d get if Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner co-wrote the HBO series 'Boardwalk Empire' while on an especially inspired, existentially tinged bender."

Since that time, Sealy has published two other novels, as well as So You Want to Be a Novelist, his memoir and manifesto. 

Jon Sealy

I recently read and loved his new novel, The King Street Affair, his southern crime novel that reaches from South Carolina to Estonia, and deals with lawyers, journalists, spies, and more. 

On Tuesday, June 16, I'll join Jon and Kent Wascom at Fountain Bookstore in Richmond for an "Authors in Conversation" event.

I had a chance to ask Jon some questions prior to that.

Steve Weddle: Why Charleston? Could this story have been set anywhere else?

Jon Sealy: The simple answer is that I'm of the school that believes fiction starts with an image, and the instigating image for this novel is the opening pages. I went to a New Year's Eve wedding at the Francis Marion Hotel years ago and then had breakfast at the Swamp Fox restaurant on a cold rainy January day. Staring out at King Street, watching water drip off the palm trees in Marion Square, the scene just sort of vibrated. Charleston has a unique effect, I think. Some of the plot would work elsewhere, in another port city--Wilmington, say--but it would be a different story.

SW:  Bert and Penelope seem so real and well developed as "secondary" characters. Any plans for a spin-off?

JS: Thank you for saying that. Maybe! I actually did write a few chapters of a book featuring Bert, where I had him retired in the Adirondacks and he gets involved with solving a murder, kind of like Le Carre did with George Smiley in his second novel, A Murder of Quality. But I didn't have the energy to keep at it. Maybe it was the setting, or maybe it was trying to write about Bert without Penelope. The King Street Affair is subtitled "A Holy City Novel," so if I do a sequel or spin-off, it also will be set primarily in Charleston and likely would include Penelope, who became one of my favorite characters in the book.

SW: When you started writing this book, did you know that the story was going to move into an espionage thriller with European gangsters?

JS: No, I actually started this as a sprawling multi-generational Cold War novel about Everett Archer, who ended up being a minor figure in the final version. I have all these pages of backstory about him in the fifties, with Naval frogmen and I don't know what else. After a few years I finally decided I needed to tell a simpler, mostly present-time story, starting with a dead body on a beach.

SW: You tell this story with shifting timelines. Was that difficult? What was the process for you?

JS: As I mentioned, I cut a lot of the backstory going back 75 years, so what's left is essentially three chunks: a guy gets picked up for interrogation in part one; then we see what led the agents to him in part two; then we see what he does to try to get out of his jackpot in part three. It was a project to try to make sure the timelines were clear and consistent, but by the end, the process mostly consisted of me foisting the novel on various beta readers and trying to fix spots where they were confused.

SW: This is your fourth novel, which is clearly written with skill and confidence. What have you learned in the last 10 years since your wonderful debut that helped with this particular story?

JS: That's kind of you. I wrote The Whiskey Baron in my early 20s and The King Street Affair in my late 30s, so I have a better sense of myself and the world, but also, I hope, a little less ego about what I'm doing. I started off like I presume a lot of writers start, wanting to write my story my way and to show off with these linguistic flourishes. The King Street Affair is a bit of a transitional book for me, but I'm moving toward writing for someone.

***

CHARLESTON, SC—Wyatt Brewer has a respectable life as a newspaper reporter in the Holy City. One winter morning, he is assigned to cover the death of a mysterious Estonian who washed up on Folly Beach.

When intelligence agents Bert Wilson and Penelope Lowe pick him up for interrogation, Wyatt understands he’s stumbled into an underground world of crime and corruption. The agents give him a choice: Help them bring down a mole in their division or fend for himself against Eastern European gangsters and dirty government officials.

Part southern crime novel, part cat-and-mouse espionage thriller, Jon Sealy’s fourth novel is a meditation on the many ways the human heart can betray us.

Get your copy

A Lot of Great Questions (and One Awkward One)

By Claire Booth

This past week, I participated in a local high school’s Career Day. Students got to pick three occupations they were interested in and go from session to session hearing representatives from each of their chosen careers talking about what their jobs entail.

I spent three sessions trying not to say that my job involves a lot of staring off into space. Instead, I talked about what it was like to be an author and what my career path has been like. The best part for me, as it is with any speech I give, is the Q&A. And I was dazzled by some of the questions these students asked.

- How do you construct an original narrative?

This teen is already serious about writing. It was obvious she’d thought a lot about it. Her question generated a great conversation with the whole group about avoiding things that seem tired, or repetitive, or really common in other books. And I told her that the fact she even asked the question showed that she’s well on her way to avoiding the problem. We also talked about an author’s “voice,” and how that’s the most original thing he or she can bring to a story.

- How do you avoid stereotypes in your characters?

I have a very definite viewpoint on this one. Meet as many people as you can. Have as many different experiences as you can. The more you know, the better and more well-rounded your characters will be. And, like with the previous question, the fact that they’re asking about it indicates that they’ll work hard to avoid stereotypes and very likely succeed.

- Is writing a career or a hobby?

Wow. This was especially appropriate, seeing as I was there for “Career Day.”

This is what I said: It won’t pay all of your bills. But what pays the bills is a job. Writing is the career.

- Is it hard to stay motivated?

Oh, yeah. I told them that establishing a routine helps me.

- How do you get past writer’s block?

I get up and move. For me, that’s the best remedy. I take a walk or water the garden or find some physical activity to do, so that my mind can wander around and figure out things while I’m otherwise occupied. Several teens really seemed receptive to this – that you don’t have to chain yourself to your desk until your writer’s block breaks.

- When you’re trying to get an agent, do you send off the whole manuscript at first?

This one forced me to go into what a query letter is (the spectacularly written explanation of your book that needs to convince someone you’ve never met that he or she should represent you, or at least ask to see your first fifty pages). That naturally led to rejection rates and when I said how many I’d gotten, there were audible gasps. I stood there thinking - how did this turn so quickly from inspiring to horrifying?

- Does your agent work just on that book or on all your books?

In most circumstances, agents are evaluating the manuscript in front of them, but they’re signing you as an author, not you for a single book. This made the students relax a little bit from my previous horror show of an answer about rejection letters. Once you get an agent, you don’t need to go get a new one for the next book.

- When do you come up with your titles – before or after you write the book?

It depends. I had examples both ways. My first Sheriff Hank Worth novel, The Branson Beauty, had that title from right when I started to write. The second, Another Man’s Ground, didn’t have that title until the book was finished.

- What’s the salary? How much do you make?

I was hoping they wouldn’t ask this. There’s not really any way to put a positive spin on the numbers. “Usually, not very much,” is what I said. But, I added, if you love to write, it’s the best career in the world. There are authors out there at every income level, and there’s nothing that says you couldn’t become one of those with a string of bestsellers. The key is to keep writing.

The Jon McGoran Interview

By Steve Weddle

Jon McGoran, known for his own novels -- Drift, Dead Out, and Dust Up -- recently published a tie-in novel for the show The Blacklist.

This Blacklist novel is about a group called The Dead Ring, as is as fast-paced and suspenseful novel as I've read in a while.

Raymond “Red” Reddington voluntarily surrenders to the FBI after eluding capture for decades. He has a list of the most dangerous criminals in the world and is willing to guide FBI operations in exchange for immunity. However, he insists on exclusively working with a rookie profiler by the name of Elizabeth Keen. A tragic warehouse fire in Turkey, a mine collapse in South Africa, a capsized ferry disaster in Indonesia: devastating mishaps, or something more sinister? Red knows these were collateral damage in a highly lucrative and deadly game known as the Dead Ring–anything but accidental. The only way to stop the ring is to destroy it from within. Keen must go undercover and play the game, knowing that in the Dead Ring there can only be one survivor.

I was curious about the idea of tie-in novels in general and with Jon's work here in particular. 

Steve Weddle: How familiar with the show were you?

Jon McGoran: I was very familiar with the show. I had watched most of the first season and a good part of the second, but I still got to binge watch a bunch more when I was approached about doing the book, so that was a lot of fun. 

SW: Did they give you a “bible” and what was that like? Were there limits to what you could do?

JM: They did not have a bible, which made things a little tricky—especially with a show that revels in the wild plot twists and swings in some of the character relationships. There are always limits, and it really does help to have them spelled out for you, at least in broad strokes. Having watched the show, I had a pretty good idea of what those limits would be. I will say that there are some amazing fan-based Wikis out there, which can be hugely useful late at night when you are wondering about some obscure aspect of a character’s back story.

SW: How many stories did you pitch and did you have one you liked but didn’t get used?

JM: This was an unusual project in that Jon Bokenkamp, the show runner, had a very specific story idea in mind. So they gave me that kernel of an idea, and I had to pitch back three or four iterations of that idea, and then we went back and forth a few times as I fleshed it out so that it was detailed enough so they could be comfortable that it did what they wanted to do and didn’t do what they didn’t want it to do. 

SW: How long did it take to write?

JM: We spent several months going back and forth on the outlines, but by the time the final outline was approved, I had two months to write the book. I’m a big outliner by nature, but in order to get approval the outline had to be even more detailed than what I usually write. With such a short window of time to write, I was very glad to have that outline.

SW: Are you doing more TV show tie-books?

JM: I don’t have anything lined up right now, but I’d certainly be open to it. Obviously, my first love is writing my own stuff, but I do enjoy playing in other sandboxes. In fact, I am honored to have just been nominated for a Scribe Award, from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, for a short story I wrote called Drive Time, for an anthology of X-Files stories, The Truth Is Out There. The winner will be announced at San Diego ComicCon.

SW: What are you working on next?

JM: I have a couple of short stories coming out, including a horror story for an anthology called Hardboiled Horror, and one for Joe Ledger: Unstoppable, an anthology of stories featuring Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger character. Jonathan asked me for a story pairing Joe Ledger with my Doyle Carrick protagonist, so that was big fun to write. But I’m most excited about my next book, Spliced, a near-future SF thriller for young adults and all adults, coming Sept. 5 from Holiday House Books. I’ve also been working with on a podcast with some of my fellow Liars Club members, the Liars Club Oddcast, from Project Entertainment Network. It’s also available on iTunes, Stitcher, and iheartradio. That’s been a huge amount of fun.

Get Yours: The Blacklist - The Dead Ring No. 166